I, Rigoberta Menchu: Chapters 15-23

These chapters cover many of the harsh conditions that Rigoberta and her people were forced to deal with and what they did in response to them. It begins by telling the great struggles that her father went through. Since her father is considered to be a father figure in her village, he felt that the safety and the future of the village rested in his hands. This was a responsibility that he took very seriously. He had many confrontations with Spanish landowners that tried to take their land away. He was constantly traveling and fighting in order to get it so that they could keep their land. He was captured once and beaten until he was near death. The people were forced out of their village several times, by soldiers, and their belongings were always destroyed when this happened. At one point, they signed a contract with the landowners believing that it meant that they would get their land and finally be left alone; but this was a trick because it only gave them their land for two years before they would be bothered again.
They spent a lot of their time learning how to defend themselves from attacks by the soldiers. They employed a variety of tactics including throwing stones, hot water and setting up traps that they had previously used for animals trying to eat their crops. They planned escape routes into the mountains incase of a sudden attack on the village which had to be used on several occasions. Several of the women in the village were raped by the soldiers and a few of them became pregnant with their children. They felt that these children were evil and could not bear to carry them because they had the soldiers’ evil blood in them. A friend of Rigoberta was brutally killed with a machete because she would not have sex with the son of the owner of a finca.
They believed in the Bible as a great source of guidance for how they should conduct themselves. They managed to get a few guns and grenades but did not know how to use them. They also could not ask anyone how since none of them could properly speak Spanish. It was during this time that Rigoberta decides to start learning Spanish from the nuns and teaching it to young children in the community in order to teach them and empower them.